'Every female scientist could produce a list of when she was treated differently or harassed'

Donna Strickland, who shared this year's Nobel prize for physics, is only the third female winner and the first in 55 years

Getty Images / Cole Burston / Stringer

With two female science professors – Canada’s Donna Strickland for physics and American Frances Arnold for chemistry – winning Nobel prizes this week, and a male professor denigrating female scientists collectively at CERN, it’s been quite a week. These stories indicate just how far we still are from true equity between the genders: the concept of women in science continues to stir the public imagination and still are necessarily regarded as ‘different’.

We are not simply scientists. We have to be identified by gender because, for too many people, a scientist is male by default.

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Despite the buzz that the award of the first Nobel prize for physics to a woman in 55 years created, there are so many ways in which this story is tinged with sadness and bias. Strickland carried out the work for which she has been awarded the prize during her PhD many years ago. This immediately raises the stark contrast with Jocelyn Bell Burnell who famously did not get the 1974 physics prize for the discovery of pulsars during her PhD when her Cambridge supervisor, Tony Hewish, did, alongside Martin Ryle. This failure for Bell Burnell is popularly attributed simply to gender.

It is certainly hard to argue that it was simply due to her lowly student status by contrasting her story with the case of another Cambridge PhD student, Brian Josephson. He was awarded the 1973 physics Nobel when his supervisor (Brian Pippard) was not. Consistency over the decades from the Nobel committee for physics does not seem to be the name of the game.

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Strickland, however, may have been recognised by the Nobel Committee, but not apparently by her host institution – she had never been promoted to a Full Professor position, languishing in the lower ranks of Associate Professor. Nor apparently did Wikipedia recognise her worth; it had rejected a write-up on its pages about her only a few months back as she wasn’t regarded as famous enough. Needless to say, that omission was rapidly corrected on Monday.

Wikipedia remains stubbornly male-dominated, despite the hard work of people like Imperial College’s physicist Jess Wade who has tirelessly tried to ensure female scientists get their fair share of write-ups. Not everyone likes this positive attempt to right a wrong, but why should so many women be written out of scientific history on the world’s first port of call for ready info?

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The Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to a woman for the first time in 55 years

No doubt in part the answer to that question can be found in the attitudes of men like Alessandro Strumia, the professor who spoke at a conference for early career researchers at CERN and decided to lambast womankind as represented by physicists, claiming that physics was “invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation”. CERN rapidly dissociated itself from his remarks and suspended him. It transpires that Strumia had once lost out on a job to a woman, perhaps sufficient to fuel his belief that men were being discriminated against across the board. Think about it: he lost out on a job to a woman and that must prove (apparently) that men are suffering at the expense of women. As has been frequently said: true equality will only be reached when as many mediocre women are promoted as mediocre men.

I suspect just about every female scientist you encounter could probably produce a list of occasions on which she has been treated differently from her male colleagues, harassed or had disparaging remarks made about her by virtue of her gender.

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Let me start the list: there was the man who told me that I only worked on starch – admittedly not every physicist’s standard research material – because it was domestic science; or the man who told me my turn for a certain role would ‘come next’ when I was on every count (actual age or position in the scientific hierarchy) more senior than the man who actually got the role.

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Never mind the time I was pinned to the wall in a conference bar by a rather drunk male or had a completely sober senior professor come up to me at a formal reception and say ‘he did like kissing games’ and act upon that statement. And I feel I’ve got off lightly in my career.

Unconscious bias training has moved us a little closer to a level playing field, but there are still too many ingrained habits in our academic workplaces which can hold women back – loading women with an unreasonable level of ‘housekeeping’ is one such disadvantage that has recently been well documented – without anyone intending to. Most women hate the idea of getting a job because they are a woman. They want to be treated fairly, appointed and promoted on merit and supported when those around them start to make life difficult. As yet, this remains a dream for too many.

Athene Donald is professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge and master of Churchill College. She tweets at @athenedonald